The list of top-10 most significant developments in e-commerce published by The Software & Information Industry Association has named Google (no wonder) at the top for this decade. The reason for that choice is how Google have changed the way the internet is being used today. The company started back in 1998 when the founders realized existing search engines don’t return much relevant results. Through their complex site ranking algorithms now we can get much more targeted results, with the sponsored results only showing aside. That was it for some time.

Few year back however Google started expanding and taking over new grounds. They released Google Desktop to index computer files, embarrassing Microsoft over their weak search feature. Along also came Gmail, selected as product #2 of the year in 2005. It came with 1 GB of mail size when others were competing in tens of MB. But that wasn’t all. The ability to search mails in fraction of seconds have minimized the importance of sorting to great extent (thought I still need it!). The AJAX rich web-based of theirs was also a shock to many, not to mention the related email grouping in one.

But that’s not the most important thing in the article, Google is already known as strongest brand and best company to work for. What is really surprising is how the software giant leaders, the guys who used to say “We Set The Standards”, those who have spoke of the internet revolution since the early 90s. How could such a big leading company be left out of the top 10 most significant developments in e-commerce. And come to think of it, they’ve earned their left behind. Let’s look around and see what they have. There is MSN Search (recently replaced by Live.com) who most people use just because it’s the default home page. There is IE which keeps crashing until you decide to shift to another client. IE7 came to the rescue but I know many who turned to Firefox because of it. Then there is Hotmail. Security holes, bugs, incompatibility, high false-positive filtering ratio. I once had email from one of my contacts list sent to Junk folder! High bounce back rate that I started deleting Hotmail accounts from my list of contact group.

Another thing I realized is, we keep looking at what the big brands are giving us, and neglect that there are very strong potential startups, who have done such things before. The blogosphere, Digg and others are doing a great job exposing those new services to the public.

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